When I was five or six or seven, I enacted the role of Wall in the drama of Pyramus and Thisbe. My older sister, Joy, the director, showed me how to hold my hand to represent the “crannied chink” through which the two lovers (my older cousins Lila and Lois) confessed their devotion. The theater was my grandparents’ parlor on California Avenue in Chicago, and our audience consisted entirely of doting family members. The show, of course, was a great success. Some years later, I reprised the role in a playground production for a community audience in Oak Park, Illinois, my hometown. I suspect that the play within the play, “the most tragical and comic drama of Pyramus and Thisbe,” is even more widely and frequently performed than Shakespeare’s wonder­ful larger play, A Mid­summer Night’s Dream, in which it appears. What can ac­count for the amazing popularity of this silly little drama? Perhaps the story is true.
 
Sixteen hundred years before Shakespeare, Ovid recorded the legend, which was then already ancient, of a girl and a boy in Babylon growing up on opposite sides of a wall erected by their respective families. In spite of parental animosities, they discovered each others’ virtues by communicating through “the crannied chink,” conspired to elope, made the attempt and met a tragic end. Shakespeare employed the plot again in Romeo and Juliet. Three hundred years later, we enjoyed the musical West Side Story and, a few years after that, the longest running Off-Broadway show was The Fantastiks, all about the same girl and boy, the same wall, the same vows and a similar denouement. There are “skateboard” movie versions of the same theme, I am told by my daughter, of even more recent vintage. Marvelously, the tale retains its glamour.